I started with the sad sculpture right outside the station. Like the Maine memorial, the Monumento Mártires del Vapor La Coubre has been stranded on a traffic island in the busy Malecón. The Maine memorial’s on the Atlantic seawall, this Monumento Mártires del Vapor La Coubre on the inner harbor, but both memorials are made of pieces of blown-up ships.
The Monument to the Martyrs of the Steamship La Coubre is a tangle of torn steel hull plates, rigging, and gears set against the great smooth rectangle of a rudder. The parts were salvaged from the wreck of La Coubre, a French freighter that was unloading at a nearby dock when it exploded on March 4, 1960.
Her cargo was seventy-six tons of weapons and munitions acquired in Antwerp for sale to Cuba’s new government. Relations with the United States had deteriorated throughout 1959, the Revolution’s first year in power. By autumn, the CIA had begun smuggling arms to anti-Castro fighters in the Escambray Mountains. Saboteurs armed and encouraged by the CIA were planting bombs in public places and setting fire to cane fields. In the same period, the CIA began assembling and training a Cuban exile army for a future invasion of the island. Castro’s government decided to invest in self-defense, and La Coubre’s cargo was considered an urgent priority.
That probably explains why the ship was unloaded at the dock, rather than by smaller boats shuttling to an anchorage out in the bay—standard procedure with such deadly cargo.
La Coubre exploded at about 3:10 P.M., killing and wounding an unknown number of stevedores, soldiers, crewmen, and bystanders. Hundreds of citizens, firemen, police, and medical workers—including Dr. Ernesto “Che” Guevara—assembled to rescue survivors and fight the blaze. Half an hour after the first explosion, the ship erupted again, still more violently, killing and wounding many rescue workers. A precise casualty count was impossible; most sources claim at least seventy-five dead and some two hundred wounded.
As with the Maine, there’s no telling what really happened to La Coubre. How many kinds of accident are possible on a munitions ship swarming with dockworkers? But countless thousands of munitions ships were unloaded during the world wars and Korea, with only a handful of ship-destroying accidents. Cuba was enduring a CIA-backed terror campaign, and an arms shipment seemed an obvious target of hostile interest. Though the second explosion could well have been accident following accident, the nastiness of its timing excited speculation about a deliberate trap.
By the next day, Revolutionary Havana was angry. Tens of thousands turned out for processions along the Malecón. Korda’s portrait of Che—originally titled Guerrillero Heroico (“Heroic Guerrilla”) and arguably the most famous photograph in history—was taken at the La Coubre funeral service. The marooned monument outside the La Coubre train station may be obscure, but the tragedy produced an image that remains the universal face of revolution: romantic, purposeful, defiant.
The day’s heat was hanging on, and I broke a serious sweaty power walking uphill alongside a two-block remnant of the city wall. It’s tremendous, at least three men high and two thick, but yesterday’s downpour had been thick as hospital curtains, and I hadn’t seen a stone of the wall as I splashed by.
Today I couldn’t miss the birthplace of José Martí, another block ahead. In decrepit Havana, fresh house paint glows like a halo in a tomb. La Casa Natal de José Martí is the only bright thing for untold blocks around, its creamy ocher walls and halcyon blue trim as cheering as unexpected kindness.
Cuba’s greatest hero was born in 1853 at the western end of Calle Paula, in a modest house that is now a modest shrine. José Julián Martí Pérez was the first child of Mariano Martí, a Valencia-born artillery sergeant, and Leonor Pérez, a young woman from the Canaries. The street is now officially named Calle Leonor Pérez, in honor of the patriot’s mother, but of course everyone still calls it Paula, after the baroque Church of San Francisco de Paula anchoring its waterfront end. (This lesser-known, fifteenth-century St. Francis founded a religious order, the Minims, renowned for abstinence from all carnal pleasures, including the taste of “flesh and white meat.”) In the mid-1850s, this end of Paula was a barely respectable neighborhood, one that went downhill over the hundred years to follow, being too convenient to the docks to escape red-light rowdiness.
Little José lived on Calle Paula for only four years before his father took the family to Spain. Two years back in Valencia apparently confirmed Mariano Martí’s original reasons for leaving, and by 1859 the Martís were once more in Havana, living across the Paseo in Calle Industria. As the family grew—José had seven sisters—Mariano made an uncertain living as a prison guard and watchman. Leonor insisted that José should be educated, and he progressed from public elementary schools to private colegios, coming under the influence of idealistic teachers and friends.
Though his parents were conservative peninsulares—immigrants to Cuba whose loyalties remained to Spain—José was a fervent Cuban patriot before he was sixteen. That, in the context of the times, is as good as saying he did jail time before he could grow a credible mustache.
The times were nasty. Young José came of age during the Ten Years’ War, the powerful but ultimately doomed revolt against Spanish rule that ravaged Cuba from 1868 to 1878. He was just fifteen when Carlos Manuel de Céspedes proclaimed the Grito de Yara. The war began in Oriente, far to the east of Havana, and the insurrection’s strength was always centered there, but rebel forces—directed by Máximo Gómez, who would survive to cooperate with William Rufus Shafter in the next war—often managed to make Havana feel threatened, even besieged. Spain’s military response was costly, inconsistent, and ineffective, but its policy of brutality toward noncombatants was an unwavering engine of atrocity. The war was essentially a no-holds-barred contest between empire and island, yet motivations on each side were hardly so simple. Spaniards and Cubans couldn’t sort out their overlapping, ambivalent loyalties and goals.
The empire’s strongest supporters in Cuba were, inevitably, peninsulares, those born on the Iberian Peninsula. There was some flexibility in this term, and a Cuban-born conservative could be lumped in with the “peninsulars.” Most Cuban-born whites, however, were loyal to their island. They were blancos, “whites,” like the peninsulares, but also criollos.
The difficulty of translating the latter word demonstrates the complexity of Cuban class, cultural, political, and racial identities. While criollo most often referred to a white Cuban of the planter or merchant class, it also meant, generically, “born here,” and as a modifier could help distinguish between a criollo negro—a “born-here black”—and a negro de nación, a black person born in Africa. Just to keep it complicated, there was another sense in which anyone living on the island could aspire to a kind of criollismo, since Cubans also used criollo to denote authenticity and integrity. This criollo is patriotic and unpretentious, good-humored and openhearted—qualities transcending class, color, nativity, and all other considerations to exalt a rootsy, congenial cubanismo that could be exemplified by a white planter or his African-born slave.
The rebels included some Spanish-born Cubans; many creoles, especially among the white upper class, were loyal to the empire. The largest of the rebel armies, in the East, were mostly composed of free blacks and runaway slaves; Spain tried hard to depict the war for independence as a race war, and many white Cubans—even some among the rebels—were fearful of black empowerment. In ten years of fighting, Spain never crushed the rebellion, but white and black, rich and poor rebels never achieved the unity they needed to pry Spain’s fingers from Cuba’s throat.
The Spaniards comprised several groups. The most powerful was the imperial administration and its military commanders, a population notoriously uncommitted to any goal more noble than finishing their Cuban tours of duty with the largest possible bank balances. Then there was the Spanish merchant and planter class, with its not dissimilar agenda. Another crucial bloc comprised immigrants from Spain’s oppressed provinces, most notably the Catalans.
The Catalans�
� role in the Ten Years’ War offers an object lesson in empire’s essential technique: divide and rule. Once a prosperous kingdom, a wealthy Mediterranean-coast region with its own distinct language and culture, Catalonia was united with the house of Aragón through marriage in 1137. The Catalans lost out in the creation of modern Spain by the merger of Aragón and Castile in 1479. An increasingly centralized state and changing international trade patterns drew commerce away from Catalonia, which also suffered from piracy, plagues, and famines.
Hoping to do better by reclaiming their independence, the Catalans were chronically rebellious, forever giving aid to plots and uprisings against Madrid, and forever paying the price in reprisal, repression, and neglect. They backed the losing side in the disastrous Carlist rebellions of the nineteenth century. The abdication of Isabella II in 1868 raised Carlist and Catalan hopes but resulted in another series of bloody defeats; the chaos in Spain encouraged Carlos Manuel de Céspedes to raise the Grito de Yara and begin Cuba’s Ten Years’ War.
With their province a perennial underdog, its people poor and growing poorer, many Catalans were available to help solve a Spanish imperial problem: Cuba’s black majority.
The great sugar boom of the late 1700s necessitated a boom in the island’s slave trade. In its first two centuries as a Spanish possession, Cuba’s main industry had been cattle raising, which required few slaves; Alexander von Humboldt estimated that by 1762, about sixty thousand slaves had been brought to the island, and a total of perhaps ninety-one thousand by 1790. From early on, Cuba’s laws allowed slaves to be freed or buy their freedom more easily than in most other New World, colonies, and in 1774 the island’s population was 56 percent white, 24 percent slaves, and 20 percent free blacks. But between 1790 and 1853, Cuba imported five hundred thousand slaves. In 1792, the population was 56.4 percent white and 43.6 percent black. By 1841, the ratio had been more than reversed, with whites making up just 41.5 percent of the population and blacks 58.5 percent.
Sugar wealth also transformed Cubans’ self-understanding. Two centuries of inefficient and absentminded administration from Madrid had made cubanos tough and self-reliant; the brief and unexpectedly profitable English occupation during the Seven Years’ War had pointed out that other colonial rulers actually encouraged their subjects to prosper. Wealth made Cubans of all classes aware of their island’s potential self-sufficiency, encouraging a sense of national identity.
Sugar wealth emboldened some Cuban planters to seek a better deal from Madrid. Others dared to dream of greater autonomy. Some imagined absorption into the British Empire, annexation by the United States—even a truly free Cuba.
In The History of Havana, Dick Cluster and Rafael Hernández offer a succinct explanation of the planters’ disunion. Despite Spain’s alienating “attempts to keep the country subservient and backward,” Cuba’s sugar-rich, slave-dependent planters could only imagine as much freedom as they were willing to give:
They wanted liberalization of trade and civil society, freed from Spanish taxation and regulation, but they needed the Spanish army to keep their human property from rising against them. They wanted a rapid end to the introduction of new slaves onto the island, and they vaguely sought some gradual withering away of the slave system itself. But they did not want to make common cause with organized groups of slaves or free blacks, or to place any weapons (physical or political) in their hands.
By the early nineteenth century, Cuba’s wealthy planters could aspire to autonomy—but they had made themselves more dependent than ever on Spain’s oppressive power by creating a black-majority island.
Haiti’s planter oligarchy—known as les grands blancs—had made an exaggerated version of the same strategic error. Intoxicated by sugar profits, plantation owners kept importing slaves until there were fifteen enslaved or free black Haitians to every white Frenchman. Despite their overwhelming advantage in numbers, few black Haitians resorted to violence; it was the whites who made routine use of force. The inevitable conflict was sparked not by black Haitians’ pent-up rage but by the betrayal of their hopes. In 1789, revolutionary France declared all men to be free and equal, and black Haitians dared to believe that Parisian ideals would become Caribbean realities. But les grands blancs refused to allow mulatto representation in the French National Assembly, effectively informing all Haitians of color, slave and free, that liberté, egalité, et fraternité would apply only to whites. And the planters began to talk of more freedom for themselves: an independent, white-run Haiti free from French taxes and restrictions on trade and slavery.
Denied participation in France’s social experiment and appalled at the prospect of a stand-alone slaveocracy, black Haitians started their own revolution. In 1804, after years of warfare and hundreds of thousands of deaths, Haiti became the second New World nation to win complete independence, and the only nation in the world created by slave rebellion.
Haiti’s revolution frightened white Cubans, even as it brought them a chance to replace the former French colony as the world’s largest producer of cane sugar and to transplant much of Haiti’s coffee industry—seed, know-how, refugee grands blancs, and their slaves—to the mountains of Oriente. Unsuccessful risings by Cuban blacks in 1812, 1843, and 1844 were crushed by imperial troops, but wealthy Cuban whites found the rebellions terrifying. Spain found them expensive. The interests of island oligarchs and empire converged in what The History of Havana calls “the one policy on which Spaniards and Cuban-born whites could agree: immigration to promote the growth of a free, non-African labor force.”
Both the imperial government and Cuba’s business class vigorously promoted emigration from Spain to Cuba. Naturally, their best prospects were denizens of Spain’s most economically and politically downtrodden provinces and possessions, including Catalonia, the Canary Islands, Asturias, and Valencia, home of Mariano Martí. The good deals included we’ll-pay-your-way-over and contract-labor arrangements, but many of Spain’s poor were desperate enough to accept that relic of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century colonization, indentured servitude. Their arrival reversed the ratio of whites to blacks as swiftly as it had shifted during the great boom in sugar and slaves. According to the U.S. War Department’s Report of the Census of Cuba, 1899, by 1862, of 1,396,530 Cubans, 56.8 percent were white and 43.2 percent black.
The Spanish administration and many Cuban planters believed that only a black majority posed a threat of rebellion. But the problem wasn’t black people, but what black people wanted: freedom. Or, rather, the problem was what white planters wanted: slavery. It didn’t matter whether there were more blacks than whites, or fewer. Human beings want to be free, and no matter how much slave owners tried to deny it, black Cubans were human beings.
Cubans of all colors fought the Spanish in the Ten Years’ War of 1868–78, but the war affected blacks much more than whites. The white population grew rapidly and steadily through 1887. By contrast, “colored” numbers grew up to 1861, reaching 603,046. Between 1861 and 1877, the “colored” population decreased by 117,149.
Over those sixteen years, at least one in five black Cubans died, while the number of white Cubans increased by 22 percent.
Between 1877 and 1887, blacks’ numbers rebounded by forty-two thousand; by 1899 they’d fallen again, losing twenty-three thousand.
This zigzag pattern fits right over the timeline of two wars: 1868–78 and 1895–98. Wars fought more in predominantly black eastern Cuba; wars fought by black-majority Cuban armies; wars that saw rural populations forced into concentration camps, where they died of starvation and disease.
If the viciousness of the Ten Years’ War can be distinguished from genocide, it’s because the Spanish and their Cuban supporters didn’t really care what color rebels and their supporters were, as long as they ended up dead, imprisoned, or in reconcentrado camps. Wherever the mambises were strong, the Spanish slaughtered peasants and drove survivors into the camps, where tens of thousands were massacred by neglect. Spanish troops were
tough, but the worst atrocities were committed by guerrilla irregulars and pro-Spanish vigilante groups. Of the latter, the batallones de voluntarios were especially trigger-happy. In the war’s first months, Havana voluntarios distinguished themselves by storming a theater where a Cuban patriotic play was in progress and shooting into the crowd.
It was the voluntarios who broke into the home of a friend of young José Martí and found a pro-rebel poem that the two boys had written. The sixteen-year-old Martí was thrown in jail and sentenced, months later, to six years on a chain gang. His parents eventually managed to have him transferred to less deadly work, and finally exiled to Spain, where he earned degrees in law, philosophy, and literature.
When the war ended, he was able to live peacefully in Cuba for several months, but the colonial government suspected him of involvement in the abortive Guerra Chiquita, the Little War, launched by Máximo Gómez, Antonio Maceo, and other holdouts against the Treaty of Zanjón. Martí fled, and spent the remainder of his life in exile in Latin America and the United States, teaching and writing for a living, working constantly to organize a rebellion that would unite all Cubans.
Martí wrote and preached rebellion like a poetical James Madison, arguing for a government checked and balanced by love. He was a radical sentimentalist, and it’s not surprising that his domestic arrangements were messy. While his wife and son stayed in Cuba, the wandering revolutionary raised a family with his married mistress, Carmen Miyares de Mantilla. (Their daughter, Maria Mantilla, was the mother of Hollywood actor Cesar Romero, famous for playing Latin gigolos and the ’60s TV Batman’s nemesis the Joker.)
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